Editorial - Measurement

Hello Dear Reader, and welcome to Issue 10 of Consilience.

This issue showcases work exploring the theme of Measurement.

Chronometers tick and cannons boom.

Brief Reflection on Accuracy by Miroslav Holub

Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.

Protagoras

Measurement is that deeply human impulse to quantify, classify, and represent the things around us. Measurement, broadly defined, is the association of numbers with physical and social phenomena. In a bid to understand the universe a little better, scientists have developed powerful tools and techniques to measure things that we believe to exist, yet these are built on simple fundamentals a child could grasp: counting and comparison. With the dawn of the scientific revolution, the scope of what could be measured expanded rapidly, and soon nearly everything could be quantified. Nowadays, we measure the absorbance of chemicals, the diameters of towering trees, the characteristics of radio waves from distant stars, the symptomatology of mental and physical ailments, the connectedness of an individual to others within their social network. If we think something exists, we try to measure it. Armed with these measurements, scientists can do much with the data. We can construct complex models with hundreds of variables to predict the future. We can express the relations between this and other quantities with mathematical precision and infer causal relations between them. Science is built on measures, and our confidence in science must rely on our confidence in them.

And yet, readers sensitive to the science-art divide might detect a cavity in the world of measures, an abrupt clearing in the forest of numerical representation. There is the world, and then there are the measures, and the gap between them seems vast. This is more than the problem of correspondence between the representation and the thing itself. Scientists sometimes forget that depression is not the Beck Depression Inventory, a well-accepted measure of depression. Phenomenologically, it is pain, collapse, exhaustion, and distress, and who knows what else it actually is. Likewise, a neutron star is not just an astronomical body with a radius of ten kilometers, nor just one that rotates at roughly ten thousand times a second. Something important feels lost through measurement when we say things like I don’t want to be a statistic because there is something deficient about existing as a number. Measures seek out reliability and thus privilege the universal over the particular; through measurement, the richness of an object seems to disappear. One goal of any consilient perspective about the world must be to bridge this gap. Perhaps we can begin with science poetry, which inheres most comfortably in the spaces between the abstract and the concrete and boasts of description as its greatest strength.

The poems of this issue take a diverse range of approaches to the issue of measurement. Measures are sobering: through Neil Philip Young’s Ballistics, we are as transfixed as the poem’s physicist by the exemplary collisions described within, culminating in the raw factuality of a particular metric. Measures bring us together: Jessica Maccaro’s In search of the perfect unit reveals a biological universalism grounded in deeper levels of analysis, while also expressing an appreciation for how these measures inform our self-understanding. Measures perturb the target of measurement: Diego Quinones’ Opposing Truths meditates on an object of much popular scientific fascination, the uncertainty principle. Measures are absurd, as portrayed by Naomi Bindman’s out of Time, Max Mulgrew’s mean time and Martin Zarrop’s Pluto: the first could be a satirical take on the above epigraph by Protagoras, the second a reflection on the all-too-familiar ritual of adjusting one’s clocks to Daylight Savings Time, while the last reveals the arbitrariness and cruelty of measurement to which the ex-planet Pluto must accede. Measures are also a crucial technology: for achieving astronaut safety in Janis Rader’s Lines of Non-Extension and for maritime exploration in Clint Wastling’s John Harrison, Gentleman. Through this issue, we invite you to enter the forest of measures, and observe the way this absurd, sobering, cruel and useful part of our human experience drives the way in which we understand the world around us.

The Consilience Team